Acclaimed skeptic and prolific author Michael Shermer will be speaking Monday, March 1, on the UW-Madison campus. He's in town as part of the Distinguished Lecture Series, and will be speaking in the UW Memorial Union Theater at 7:30 pm.

Why People Believe Weird Things will be the topic of his talk. During the evening, he will explore "pseudoscience, superstitions, and other confusions of our time."

Tickets are free and available to both the university community and the public. They may be obtained at the UW Memorial Union box office, at 800 Landgon Street.

Dr. Shermer’s biographical information:
Dr. Shermer's latest books are The Mind of the Market, on evolutionary economics, and Why Darwin Matters: Evolution and the Case Against Intelligent Design. He is the author of Science Friction: Where the Known Meets the Unknown, about how the mind works and how thinking goes wrong. His book The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Share Care, and Follow the Golden Rule, is on the evolutionary origins of morality and how to be good without God. He wrote a biography, In Darwin's Shadow, about the life and science of the co-discoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace. He also wrote The Borderlands of Science, about the fuzzy land between science and pseudoscience, and Denying History, on Holocaust denial and other forms of pseudo history. His book How We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God, presents his theory on the origins of religion and why people believe in God. He is also the author of Why People Believe Weird Things on pseudoscience, superstitions, and other confusions of our time.

Dr. Shermer received his B.A. in psychology from Pepperdine University, M.A. in experimental psychology from California State University, Fullerton, and his Ph.D. in the history of science from Claremont Graduate University. Since his creation of the Skeptics Society, Skeptic magazine, and the Skeptics Distinguished Science Lecture Series at Caltech, he has appeared on such shows as 20/20, Dateline, Charlie Rose, Larry King Live, Tom Snyder, Donahue, Oprah, Lezza, Unsolved Mysteries, and other shows as a skeptic of weird and extraordinary claims, as well as interviews in countless documentaries aired on PBS, A&E, Discovery, The History Channel, The Science Channel, and The Learning Channel.

Dr. Michael Shermer is the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine, the Executive Director of the Skeptics Society, a monthly columnist for Scientific American, the host of the Skeptics Distinguished Science Lecture Series at Caltech, and Adjunct Professor of Economics at Claremont Graduate University.

Tickets for Michael Shermer will be available to the general public starting Wednesday, February 24, at the Union Box Office, located at 800 Langdon Street, Madison.